It has been almost a year since I involuntarily left Facebook, and it has been great for my mental health. There are some folks I miss seeing there, but there were so few of them left in the first place. What I have noticed, going to Instagram now and then (mostly for the cats), is that filters and glow-ups of humans have completely distorted the reality of what real humans look like.
Two examples immediately come to mind, and oddly enough, they were given to me by the algorithm. First, a tattoo artist named Pamela made a series of posts about how tattoo artists were touching up their portfolio pictures to the point that they looked like electronic drawings. Her policy is to post her work as-is. She pointed out that if you can't see the pores on the skin, it just ain't real. Skin is not a perfect medium, and that's a constraint of tattoo art. Another, more recent one, was a woman who calls herself "Saggy Sara." She captures the "plasticization" of people on the Internet in vivid detail, by showing before-and-afters of herself, filtered. She shows how the world creates unrealistic expectations about weight, skin, hair, teeth and the rest of it.
It got me to thinking about my earliest intimate encounters. What I remember most vividly is the textures, freckles, tiny hairs and the way that skin bunches up on itself. And mind, you, that was not-even-20 skin at the time! (Also, pre-WWW, because I ain't young.) But even daily dorm life painted a different picture than I expected. The archetypical "hot girl" from my high school ended up going to the same school as me, and lived one floor above me my freshman year. Seeing her without makeup, messy hair, in frumpy pajamas, totally reframed my understanding of her. She was human, like any of us. To this day, that natural, imperfect thing is what I find most attractive. Fake Internet people don't do it for me.
I'm not railing against makeup or fitness or whatever, or even the "influencers" (not a job) that peddle tutorials on the Internet. In some ways I admire the people who are good at that sort of thing. If it helps you feel good, more power to you. What I don't like is the fake, filtered view of humans. I saw someone famous on TV the other day, dealing with a bit of acne, and I thought, that's a real person. That's acceptable. I hope we can get back to that sort of thing.
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